Exactly! My thoughts on the subject are that the girl, horribly sexually repressed as a result of her parents' teachings, went off looking for pornography as part of normal child curiosity. Only later (a week!) did she recall the incident to her mother out of guilt for what she had done, though she alleviated her own culpability by making up this story.
Good point, but in this case it isn't necessary to prove causality. The fact that wider availability of pornography did not cause GREATER sexual criminal activity is enough to dispose of the claims of the former poster.
Doug
Re:Sorry, I'm in a bad mood this morning...
on
Full Moon
·
· Score: 2
I agree that the people who were responsible for the Apollo missions on the ground have never been properly recognized.
My favorite episode of Tom Hank's HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon" is the one about the building of the LEM. In fact the series makes a point to give at least some time to EVERYONE involved, including the astronaut's wives.
This book, however, is not the proper forum for these subjects. It is a book of images, not words. No matter how interesting the accounts of building the spacecraft may be, a photograph of man walking on the moon is vastly more awe inspiring than a photo of a clean room or an assembly line.
Actually, its not his multi-threading which is the problem. Graphics in java are multithreaded within the language, which is supposed to aid applets which may need to grab images off of a server.
It is possible to force your main thread to block until images load, but he obviously doesn't know (For the previous poster, look into the MediaTracker interface).
Yeah, all we need is a replacement for CD's which hold 50 gigs, costs a quarter, is read/written faster than ram and all drives have open source drivers...
Whew... reality setting in. Companies that spend the money to R&D these new formats want to recoup that money. Part of that is controlling your format, another is making your format useful for some market, be it the end user (Iomega zip & jazz) or content providers (CD & DVD's).
Aw, come on. Sure there is. Censorship prevents you from getting something you want. Labeling makes it easier to determine what you want. Censorship may be present with labelling, but labelling itself is not censoring. Not true! When a record company has the option of releasing 2 versions of a song, one which has been censored, they will look at where they can sell that product. When stores like Walmart and Kmart refuse to carry the non-censored versions, they're going to give censoring a good look. Besides, how many people don't buy a cd because its lyrics have been changed? How many people would even know about it? Thus the deciding factor is not whether the product is censored, but how much exposure they can get for it. Doug
I would agree that science and religion should be answering two seperate problems. I have a problem, however, when religion attempts to answer the scientific questions as well.
As for your first statement, my point is that even if the probability is one out of every single possible planet in all possible universes, the fact that we exist shows that the probability is non-zero.
You ask me to prove that God does not exist, yet using Godel's incompleteness theorem prove such a proof is impossible!
I can safely assume that there are no pink-polka-dotted elephants running around downtown Manhattan, since there isn't any credible physical evidence to support it. That doesn't mean that I can prove it without being able to see every microscopic part of New York at every point in space-time.
Such is the case with 'God.' Personal belief is not stringent proof, and the statement that "God must exist since I cannot imagine any other way" is arrogant beyond any "intellectual purity" I could demonstrate.
I will believe in God when you can give me a repeatable, well designed and defined experiement for testing God's existence.
It really doesn't matter how unlikely life is, since the proof that it is possible lies with us.
Lets say life only forms on one out of a billion planets (in my opinion a very low estimate, but this is for the sake of example). So out of a billion 'earths' only one forms life. It doesn't matter that life didn't form on 999 million other planets, since no intelligent life is there to notice!
The use of 'God' to explain everything we don't understand is repugnant to me. Just because we have yet to fully understand the mechanism by which life mutates and evolves doesn't mean that it should automatically be attributed to an omnipotent diety.
If you would rather eliminate all of your uncertainties by simply attributing them to 'God', then that's your choice, but I would rather truly know. If it really turns out that an intelligent entity is responsible for existence, then great. I have yet to see, however, any concrete evidence towards this conclusion. Remember, just because you cannot think of any other possible way doesn't mean a different (correct!) one doesn't exist.
Doug
Re:...and if problems are related...
on
NASA Gets Smart
·
· Score: 2
The new module is already built (for the most part). It is a modified navy module which was used in some type of military spy satellite launcher (I'm not certain of the details).
See http://www.pbs.org/spacestation/ for details on a pbs special which aired a few weeks back about the international space station and this exact problem.
I agree completely. Some of these you could put off, as they are commonly found in high-school english classes (I've been assigned Of Mice and Men 3 times!).
Another classic I'd like to add which falls into the fantasy category is Watership Down (I unfortunately don't remember the author).
I heard about a project like this a few years back, although I believe they were encoding the timing on the barcode, not a url. Privacy concerns aside, this is terrific for people with sight disabilities. If you can't read the instructions on the box, there's no way you can cook the meal, which reduces your ability to be self-sufficient. Doug
Obviously Lucas can, has, and will do whatever he wants with the Star Wars series, that's his prerogative.
As a consumer, I can do one of two things, accept shit, as most people do, eat it up and love it. Or I can decide not to accept poor quality, be it in workmanship, customer service, or design. In a free market, the consumer has the ultimate power, if they choose to exercise it. If every single person sees TPM in the theaters, buys the VHS (then the DVD when it is released), buys the toys, and the little happy meals, then Lucas wins. He can release whatever he wants, and make huge amounts of money.
If you have any displeasure, as I do, in the quality of TPM, and the apparent desire of Lucas not to make a worthy prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, but to make another billion, then you must tell Lucas in the only way he will listen.
If you would rather to continue eating shit, be my guest, but I for one will not stand for it!
I have always loved the first three Star Wars movies. They will always be classics in my mind. Great story, simple, yet effective plot and exciting action.
TPM lost the magic that was in the first 3. Not only was it over hyped and poorly written, but I was quite put off by the amount of sheer marketing put into it. This was simply a moneymaking venture by Lucas, nothing more. I went to see TPM the first day... no matter how good the next one is, I refuse to see it the first day, my confidence in Lucas as a filmmaker has been irrevocably shattered.
Because of this, I doubt I will EVER buy TPM on VHS -or- DVD, simply because that will only encourage Lucas to make more terrible movies. The man has far too much money as it is, without subsidizing his toy market.
Before TPM came out, I remarked to a friend that Lucas would be insane not to release the first three on DVD. I would go out and buy a player simply to watch those movies! I would also be willing to spend well more for those three than I would for any other DVDs.
Besides... DVD is the perfect format for Lucas, who has championed superior graphics and sound in movies.
I know I'm jumping all over the place with this post, so I will summarize.
We in the geek community have showed intense loyalty and devotion to Lucas and his creations. He stabbed us in the back and showed himself to be more interested in money rather than in art. My only response can be to use what little power I have, the power of the almighty-$ in order to demonstrate my disapproval. I hope others will follow my example.
It's not like there's a shortage of IT workers or anything
This is exactly why he couldn't just quit. If your job, and thus your ability to support your family was threatened, then there's no way he can simply quit. He wasn't guaranteed a job elsewhere, so the (possibly hollow) threat of termination was very real to him.
I for one am very grateful to all of the IT workers who did work long hours the past months making sure that Y2K did flop. I was fortunate enough to be able to party a little, but that doesn't mean I don't respect others' desires to be allowed to join in what was the biggest event in years.
Doug
Re:Functionality Makes It To A Linux GUI
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 2
The problem occurs any time the focus is switched without the users explicit approval. I will often open multiple browser windows (internet explorer, not sure if Netscape exhibits this behavior) to load all of my favorite sites, so I can then switch between them at my leisure. Unfortunately, while I am typing in urls in one window, another window which has finished displaying grabs the focus and interrupts my typing.
No program/window should grab focus by itself, the window manager instead should surrender focus if the situation merits it (of course that's the difficult question). When a new program is started, chances are a window manager window will be closing or losing focus, so switching to the new window is fairly safe.
Doug
Re:Functionality Makes It To A Linux GUI
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 2
Actually Gnome still doesn't have its own WM, although they are considering adopting Sawmill as their "standard." As to the Gnome file manager, the current one is simply a temporary measure.
Here is a bit from a recent Gnome developer interview:
GMC and GNOME
I know that it was decided to drop GMC as the file manager for GNOME. Can you please tell us why GMC was dropped? What is its replacement? What will the major differences be between it and GMC?
[Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnu.org)]
The GNOME team will make an announcement about the next generation file manager soon. I can tell you that GMC was just a stop-gap measure that grew too much. There is a new code based being worked that will be soon announced to the public.
[Federico Mena Quintero (federico@redhat.com)]
GMC is the GNOME edition of the venerable Midnight Commander file manager. We made a mistake when we decided to make it into a graphical file manager for GNOME; at that point we were naive and we thought that the MC code base provided a good framework for a GUI file manager.
MC has a very particular and idiosyncratic architecture; it is a piece of code that has evolved over the years and was never designed to be extensible or to accomodate other UI paradigms than text terminals. So it has its own internal "text mode" widget system and its event model permeates to many areas of the code. The code flow is hard to follow, and it is hard to bend it to accomodate something like GTK+'s event model.
Also, the virtual file system (VFS) that MC uses is completely synchronous. This does not scale very well to a graphical desktop, where you may want to perform several file operations at once. The new replacement for the Midnight Commander is an as-yet-unnamed file manager living in the "gnome-fm" module on the GNOME CVS repository. It uses a new VFS that is completely non-blocking and supports asynchronous operations, and has a much cleaner architecture as well. The new file manager is designed to be able to plug in Bonobo components so that you can install viewers for different types of files or different file systems altogether. Basically, the new file manager is designed to be extensible and to integrate well with a graphical desktop. And the new VFS can be used by all applications so that they can access any file system, local or remote, with a consistent interface.
You might possibly be correct given a self-aware machine in an isolated environment.
Andrew was relegated to a very low (lower than human slave) class due to what he was. I would consider it a very natural instinct for any intelligent being to see their situation, compare it to their persecutor's situation, and come to the conclusion that it was better to be the persecutor rather than the victim.
Actually, in the Asimov universe, robots never controlled humans. Daneel Olivaw (later Deneezel in the Foundation series) developed the ability to manipulate minds, but never used it for explicit control.
I like the fact that Asimov didn't go down the route of many a B movie and make the robots "take over the world." Far too many people fear technology today because of this, and see it as an inevitability. I think Asimov investigated the consequences of his 3 laws of robotics quite thoroughly, and at the very least demonstrated that robots won't inevitably turn on their creators (provided the creators have a little common sense).
Actually many people do type them in. People who have never used the internet are much more likely to type in a url they see on the side of a bus, than to go to yahoo to search for it.
1 Microsoft Way, to use your analogy is much easier to remember and to type in than 3 Microsoft Way.
Besides, everything else aside, he PAID for 1 Microsoft Way and now he's got NOTHING. Start-up companies cannot afford to purchase essential things and then not recieve them or a refund.
In web businesses your domain name can be one of your most valuable assets.
Imagine deciding to start a car dealership, purchasing a large lot of land, only to have it mysteriously sold to someone else.
You've lost the money invested in the land, as well as the land itself, your proposed place of business. If that isn't enough to kill any business plan I don't know what is!
I've also had my share of bad experiences with Network solutions.
I have a private domain name registered, so my name is in their system. Several months ago their billing database was corrupted (at least in my case) and I became the billing contact for a random domain.
The first I heard of this is when I received a bill for that domain. I checked their whois database and found that I had become the billing contact. I sent them a polite email notifying them of the mistake, but they have so far refused to correct the error.
I instead was forced to contact the true owners of the domain and ask them to complain to Network Solutions.
It really scares me that a company whose entire business is in keeping a database of information can't even keep their billing database accurate.
What sun is trying to do it save their creation from the jowls of Microsoft. Do you just want another Visual Basic?
If Sun retains control than that is exactly what we're going to get! Sun just wants to take over from Microsoft.
Java has potential. It is very annoying to use currently, since it is in active development. If the changes to the language are motivated by the desire to improve the language, it will make a good platform. If, on the other hand, it continues to be abused by Sun, Microsoft, and whomever else gets their hands on it, it will never realize its potential.
That's why I wish to see the overall design taken out of Sun's hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! My thoughts on the subject are that the girl, horribly sexually repressed as a result of her parents' teachings, went off looking for pornography as part of normal child curiosity. Only later (a week!) did she recall the incident to her mother out of guilt for what she had done, though she alleviated her own culpability by making up this story.
Doug
Good point, but in this case it isn't necessary to prove causality. The fact that wider availability of pornography did not cause GREATER sexual criminal activity is enough to dispose of the claims of the former poster.
Doug
I agree that the people who were responsible for the Apollo missions on the ground have never been properly recognized.
My favorite episode of Tom Hank's HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon" is the one about the building of the LEM. In fact the series makes a point to give at least some time to EVERYONE involved, including the astronaut's wives.
This book, however, is not the proper forum for these subjects. It is a book of images, not words. No matter how interesting the accounts of building the spacecraft may be, a photograph of man walking on the moon is vastly more awe inspiring than a photo of a clean room or an assembly line.
Doug
Actually, its not his multi-threading which is the problem. Graphics in java are multithreaded within the language, which is supposed to aid applets which may need to grab images off of a server.
It is possible to force your main thread to block until images load, but he obviously doesn't know (For the previous poster, look into the MediaTracker interface).
Doug
Yeah, all we need is a replacement for CD's which hold 50 gigs, costs a quarter, is read/written faster than ram and all drives have open source drivers...
Whew... reality setting in. Companies that spend the money to R&D these new formats want to recoup that money. Part of that is controlling your format, another is making your format useful for some market, be it the end user (Iomega zip & jazz) or content providers (CD & DVD's).
Doug
Aw, come on. Sure there is. Censorship prevents you from getting something you want. Labeling makes it easier to determine what you want. Censorship may be present with labelling, but labelling itself is not censoring. Not true! When a record company has the option of releasing 2 versions of a song, one which has been censored, they will look at where they can sell that product. When stores like Walmart and Kmart refuse to carry the non-censored versions, they're going to give censoring a good look. Besides, how many people don't buy a cd because its lyrics have been changed? How many people would even know about it? Thus the deciding factor is not whether the product is censored, but how much exposure they can get for it. Doug
I would agree that science and religion should be answering two seperate problems. I have a problem, however, when religion attempts to answer the scientific questions as well.
As for your first statement, my point is that even if the probability is one out of every single possible planet in all possible universes, the fact that we exist shows that the probability is non-zero.
Doug
Wrong! It is very easy to prove that something does exist. I think therefore I am. QED.
It is the null hypothesis which is impossible.
Doug
You ask me to prove that God does not exist, yet using Godel's incompleteness theorem prove such a proof is impossible!
I can safely assume that there are no pink-polka-dotted elephants running around downtown Manhattan, since there isn't any credible physical evidence to support it. That doesn't mean that I can prove it without being able to see every microscopic part of New York at every point in space-time.
Such is the case with 'God.' Personal belief is not stringent proof, and the statement that "God must exist since I cannot imagine any other way" is arrogant beyond any "intellectual purity" I could demonstrate.
I will believe in God when you can give me a repeatable, well designed and defined experiement for testing God's existence.
Doug
It really doesn't matter how unlikely life is, since the proof that it is possible lies with us.
Lets say life only forms on one out of a billion planets (in my opinion a very low estimate, but this is for the sake of example). So out of a billion 'earths' only one forms life. It doesn't matter that life didn't form on 999 million other planets, since no intelligent life is there to notice!
The use of 'God' to explain everything we don't understand is repugnant to me. Just because we have yet to fully understand the mechanism by which life mutates and evolves doesn't mean that it should automatically be attributed to an omnipotent diety.
If you would rather eliminate all of your uncertainties by simply attributing them to 'God', then that's your choice, but I would rather truly know. If it really turns out that an intelligent entity is responsible for existence, then great. I have yet to see, however, any concrete evidence towards this conclusion. Remember, just because you cannot think of any other possible way doesn't mean a different (correct!) one doesn't exist.
Doug
The new module is already built (for the most part). It is a modified navy module which was used in some type of military spy satellite launcher (I'm not certain of the details).
See http://www.pbs.org/spacestation/ for details on a pbs special which aired a few weeks back about the international space station and this exact problem.
Doug
I agree completely. Some of these you could put off, as they are commonly found in high-school english classes (I've been assigned Of Mice and Men 3 times!).
Another classic I'd like to add which falls into the fantasy category is Watership Down (I unfortunately don't remember the author).
Doug
I have to second A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle, as I haven't seen anyone else mention it.
I remember reading it when I was very young (somewhere around 8) and it helped open my eyes to the vast amount of science fiction and fantasy.
Doug
I heard about a project like this a few years back, although I believe they were encoding the timing on the barcode, not a url. Privacy concerns aside, this is terrific for people with sight disabilities. If you can't read the instructions on the box, there's no way you can cook the meal, which reduces your ability to be self-sufficient. Doug
Obviously Lucas can, has, and will do whatever he wants with the Star Wars series, that's his prerogative.
As a consumer, I can do one of two things, accept shit, as most people do, eat it up and love it. Or I can decide not to accept poor quality, be it in workmanship, customer service, or design. In a free market, the consumer has the ultimate power, if they choose to exercise it. If every single person sees TPM in the theaters, buys the VHS (then the DVD when it is released), buys the toys, and the little happy meals, then Lucas wins. He can release whatever he wants, and make huge amounts of money.
If you have any displeasure, as I do, in the quality of TPM, and the apparent desire of Lucas not to make a worthy prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, but to make another billion, then you must tell Lucas in the only way he will listen.
If you would rather to continue eating shit, be my guest, but I for one will not stand for it!
Doug
I have always loved the first three Star Wars movies. They will always be classics in my mind. Great story, simple, yet effective plot and exciting action.
TPM lost the magic that was in the first 3. Not only was it over hyped and poorly written, but I was quite put off by the amount of sheer marketing put into it. This was simply a moneymaking venture by Lucas, nothing more. I went to see TPM the first day... no matter how good the next one is, I refuse to see it the first day, my confidence in Lucas as a filmmaker has been irrevocably shattered.
Because of this, I doubt I will EVER buy TPM on VHS -or- DVD, simply because that will only encourage Lucas to make more terrible movies. The man has far too much money as it is, without subsidizing his toy market.
Before TPM came out, I remarked to a friend that Lucas would be insane not to release the first three on DVD. I would go out and buy a player simply to watch those movies! I would also be willing to spend well more for those three than I would for any other DVDs.
Besides... DVD is the perfect format for Lucas, who has championed superior graphics and sound in movies.
I know I'm jumping all over the place with this post, so I will summarize.
We in the geek community have showed intense loyalty and devotion to Lucas and his creations. He stabbed us in the back and showed himself to be more interested in money rather than in art. My only response can be to use what little power I have, the power of the almighty-$ in order to demonstrate my disapproval. I hope others will follow my example.
Doug
It's not like there's a shortage of IT workers or anything
This is exactly why he couldn't just quit. If your job, and thus your ability to support your family was threatened, then there's no way he can simply quit. He wasn't guaranteed a job elsewhere, so the (possibly hollow) threat of termination was very real to him.
I for one am very grateful to all of the IT workers who did work long hours the past months making sure that Y2K did flop. I was fortunate enough to be able to party a little, but that doesn't mean I don't respect others' desires to be allowed to join in what was the biggest event in years.
Doug
The problem occurs any time the focus is switched without the users explicit approval. I will often open multiple browser windows (internet explorer, not sure if Netscape exhibits this behavior) to load all of my favorite sites, so I can then switch between them at my leisure. Unfortunately, while I am typing in urls in one window, another window which has finished displaying grabs the focus and interrupts my typing.
No program/window should grab focus by itself, the window manager instead should surrender focus if the situation merits it (of course that's the difficult question). When a new program is started, chances are a window manager window will be closing or losing focus, so switching to the new window is fairly safe.
Doug
Actually Gnome still doesn't have its own WM, although they are considering adopting Sawmill as their "standard." As to the Gnome file manager, the current one is simply a temporary measure.
Here is a bit from a recent Gnome developer interview:
GMC and GNOME
I know that it was decided to drop GMC as the file manager for GNOME. Can you please tell us why GMC was dropped? What is its replacement? What will the major differences be between it and GMC?
[Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnu.org)]
The GNOME team will make an announcement about the next generation file manager soon. I can tell you that GMC was just a stop-gap measure that grew too much. There is a new code based being worked that will be soon announced to the public.
[Federico Mena Quintero (federico@redhat.com)]
GMC is the GNOME edition of the venerable Midnight Commander file manager. We made a mistake when we decided to make it into a graphical file manager for GNOME; at that point we were naive and we thought that the MC code base provided a good framework for a GUI file manager.
MC has a very particular and idiosyncratic architecture; it is a piece of code that has evolved over the years and was never designed to be extensible or to accomodate other UI paradigms than text terminals. So it has its own internal "text mode" widget system and its event model permeates to many areas of the code. The code flow is hard to follow, and it is hard to bend it to accomodate something like GTK+'s event model.
Also, the virtual file system (VFS) that MC uses is completely synchronous. This does not scale very well to a graphical desktop, where you may want to perform several file operations at once. The new replacement for the Midnight Commander is an as-yet-unnamed file manager living in the "gnome-fm" module on the GNOME CVS repository. It uses a new VFS that is completely non-blocking and supports asynchronous operations, and has a much cleaner architecture as well. The new file manager is designed to be able to plug in Bonobo components so that you can install viewers for different types of files or different file systems altogether. Basically, the new file manager is designed to be extensible and to integrate well with a graphical desktop. And the new VFS can be used by all applications so that they can access any file system, local or remote, with a consistent interface.
You might possibly be correct given a self-aware machine in an isolated environment.
Andrew was relegated to a very low (lower than human slave) class due to what he was. I would consider it a very natural instinct for any intelligent being to see their situation, compare it to their persecutor's situation, and come to the conclusion that it was better to be the persecutor rather than the victim.
Doug
Actually, in the Asimov universe, robots never controlled humans. Daneel Olivaw (later Deneezel in the Foundation series) developed the ability to manipulate minds, but never used it for explicit control.
I like the fact that Asimov didn't go down the route of many a B movie and make the robots "take over the world." Far too many people fear technology today because of this, and see it as an inevitability. I think Asimov investigated the consequences of his 3 laws of robotics quite thoroughly, and at the very least demonstrated that robots won't inevitably turn on their creators (provided the creators have a little common sense).
Doug
Actually many people do type them in. People who have never used the internet are much more likely to type in a url they see on the side of a bus, than to go to yahoo to search for it.
1 Microsoft Way, to use your analogy is much easier to remember and to type in than 3 Microsoft Way.
Besides, everything else aside, he PAID for 1 Microsoft Way and now he's got NOTHING. Start-up companies cannot afford to purchase essential things and then not recieve them or a refund.
Doug
In web businesses your domain name can be one of your most valuable assets.
Imagine deciding to start a car dealership, purchasing a large lot of land, only to have it mysteriously sold to someone else.
You've lost the money invested in the land, as well as the land itself, your proposed place of business. If that isn't enough to kill any business plan I don't know what is!
Doug
I've also had my share of bad experiences with Network solutions.
I have a private domain name registered, so my name is in their system. Several months ago their billing database was corrupted (at least in my case) and I became the billing contact for a random domain.
The first I heard of this is when I received a bill for that domain. I checked their whois database and found that I had become the billing contact. I sent them a polite email notifying them of the mistake, but they have so far refused to correct the error.
I instead was forced to contact the true owners of the domain and ask them to complain to Network Solutions.
It really scares me that a company whose entire business is in keeping a database of information can't even keep their billing database accurate.
Doug
What sun is trying to do it save their creation from the jowls of Microsoft. Do you just want another Visual Basic?
If Sun retains control than that is exactly what we're going to get! Sun just wants to take over
from Microsoft.
Java has potential. It is very annoying to use currently, since it is in active development. If the changes to the language are motivated by the desire to improve the language, it will make a good platform. If, on the other hand, it continues to be abused by Sun, Microsoft, and whomever else gets their hands on it, it will never realize its potential.
That's why I wish to see the overall design taken out of Sun's hands.
Doug